Al-Gamal told national TV prior to his resignation that he wished to leave his post and return to teaching.

“It’s my right now to rest, to find myself back at Cairo University and at law school among my students,” he said.

“My nature is a professor and an academic,” al-Gamal added.

Al-Gamal, 81, held the position of minister of administrative relations and prime ministry affairs prior to being part of what is referred to as “the revolution cabinet.”

Prime Minister Sharaf had announced a cabinet reshuffle would be announced within one week on Monday, in an address to the nation.

The resignation and the reshuffle comes as public anger at the current cabinet for “ignoring the demands of the revolution,” according to most activists in the country, continues to gain steam.

Speedy trials of the officers accused of killing protesters during the 18-day uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak, is a top priority within the demands of the revolutionaries camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Public trials of Mubarak and his aides, specifically former Minister of Interior Habib al-Adly, comes a close second. Other demands include the removal of the old regime’s affiliates from current positions within the government, national media, the judiciary, the labor movement, heads of public universities, those who were assigned by Mubarak and his aides and within the ministry of interior are recurring demands from all political movements in Egypt at the moment.

Sharaf promised in his second speech within a week on Monday to “respect the demands of the revolution” and ordered the suspension of all accused police officers, a decision that brought criticism from the interior ministry and the coalition of police officers who called it “illegitimate.”

The police officer coalition has called for a march by police in rejection of the decision that will see the suspension of around 300 officers.

Currently police officers who are accused of opening fire on protesters are either at their old posts or have been moved to other cities, a move the public coins as leading to a “collision” on the ministry’s part.

The ministry of interior has agreed to adhere to the prime minister’s demands after he initially rejected the notion.

According to Sharaf’s latest address, the police movements and suspensions will be declared by July 15.

Sharaf’s speech drew great discontent from the protesters, who accused him of “selling out” on the revolution and many activists across Egypt have threatened to escalate their protests and enter a stage of widespread civil disobedience.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Tuesday evening to push for greater reforms. A concert was the main event and Egyptians, despite earlier tensions across the capital, appeared to put aside differences of opinions on the direction of the protest movement to create yet another sign of unity in a country that only five months ago ousted a government that had been in power for over three decades.

In January 2004, the US military announced that it was investigating claims of abuse at Abu Ghraib―aware that leaked photos of the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees would inevitably become public. The first photos were published in late April 2004 and provoked a storm of international revulsion, further fuelling mass antiwar sentiment.

The Howard government was one of the few in the world that still had forces deployed in the US-led occupation of Iraq when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. Its immediate response was to deny that either it or the Australian military had prior knowledge of prisoner abuse. Howard declared: “We were not involved.”

This claim was soon exposed as a lie. Australian military officers were embedded in US military headquarters in Baghdad and were aware of the allegations surrounding Abu Ghraib and other cases of abuse. They had seen an October 2003 Red Cross report that provided damning details of prisoner mistreatment, and they communicated the allegations to their superiors and the government in Canberra.

Australian Major George O’Kane was working for the main US military legal unit in Iraq. In August 2003 he provided advice on the legality of the interrogation techniques that the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade intended to apply at Abu Ghraib. O’Kane visited the prison on a number of occasions. He drafted replies to two Red Cross reports outlining charges of abuse, in which he argued some Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

Britain: The Supreme Court has banned the state from using secret evidence by the state in a bid to cover up allegations of complicity in torture: here.

The 28th Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan was killed on July 4. In what is becoming a routine, Prime Minister Julia Gillard used the occasion of giving the nation’s condolences on July 6 to harangue an increasingly sceptical public about the necessity for the occupation to continue: here.

As if it’s not bad enough that our Defence personnel are being used as cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are now taking to the streets of Sydney “to provide assistance to the people of Australia in times of civil emergency, including in response to terrorist incidents”: here.

Film director Jim Loach explores the deportation of thousands of children from England and their incarceration in Australia’s outback: here.

THE Court of Appeal will on Monday 18th July 2011 commence a three-day hearing to consider the lawfulness of the refusal by Liam Fox, Secretary of State for Defence, to hold a public inquiry into allegations of torture and inhumane treatment of Iraqis by British forces: here.

Defence Secretary Liam Fox will be challenged at the Court of Appeal tomorow over his refusal to launch a public inquiry into the alleged torture of Iraqis by British troops: here.

Since this rhinoceros-looking, three-horned dinosaur lived so close to the mass extinction moment, it could negate an earlier theory that dinosaurs gradually died out before 65 million years ago.

“Our paper suggests that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact,” lead author Tyler Lyson told Discovery News. “The fact that this dinosaur is so close to the K-T boundary lends support to the idea that they went extinct as a result of a meteorite impact.”

Lyson, a researcher in Yale University’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, and his team discovered the remains of the Triceratops, including its over 1.5-foot-long horn, just 5 inches below the pollen-calibrated K-T boundary at Camel Butte, a hill at the Hell Creek Formation in southeastern Montana.

By studying the region’s geological layers, the scientists can see how dinosaurs suddenly disappeared after the catastrophic event, which Lyson and many other experts believe was a meteorite strike that directly hit Earth at Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Lyson said that “we don’t fully understand the kill mechanism,” but other researchers “have a proposed a nuclear winter, while others have proposed a thermal pulse.”

The prior theory that dinosaurs gradually died out before 65 million years ago was often based on what is known as the “3-meter gap,” which referred to an apparent geological zone devoid of dinosaur fossils before the K-T event.

The Hell Creek Triceratops, however, was not only found within that 3-meter region, but it also exists at the upper reaches of it, proving that at least one dinosaur and presumably more were still alive when the meteorite blasted into Chicxulub, Mexico.

Co-author Stephen Chester of Yale’s Department of Anthropology told Discovery News that the Camel Butte site is important both because it has “the most recent dinosaur specimen” and “because we are finding a great diversity of small mammals that are first documented directly after the extinction event.”

Chester continued, “Although the K-T mass extinction event is mainly known for the disappearance of the non-avian dinosaurs, it is also an extremely important event in mammalian evolution because once the dinosaurs vanished, mammals underwent a large adaptive radiation and began occupying diverse ecological niches in the Paleocene.”

These mammals included condylarths, which were hoofed animals proposed to be ancestral to some modern orders of hoofed mammals. They also included multituberculates, which Chester described as being “extinct rodent-like animals with a very specialized dentition.”

It remains unclear why certain mammals, turtles and other animals survived the K-T extinction event, but Lyson explained that species with generalist, rather than specialized, diets tended to fare better, as did smaller animals and water dwellers.

Johnson told Discovery News that he agrees the Triceratops is indeed “the last known non-avian dinosaur of the Cretaceous.” He said, “The 3M Gap is a weak concept to begin with,” and that his own work on plants and insects supports the idea that the meteor impact was the “direct and immediate cause of habitat destruction and extinction of more than 50 percent of North American plant and insect species.”

Peter Sheehan, curatorial chair of the Milwaukee Public Museum‘s Department of Geology, also agrees with the new findings. He and all of the other researchers, however, suspect that more recent dinosaurs even closer to the K-T boundary will be found in the future.

For now, however, the 65-million-year-old Triceratops is the world’s last known surviving dinosaur.

Many dinosaurs and pterosaurs were active both by day and night, and some were entirely nocturnal, a new study suggests: here.

THE fate of the dinosaurs may have been sealed half a billion years before life even appeared, by two geological time bombs that still lurk near our planet’s core. A controversial new hypothesis links massive eruptions of lava that coincided with many of Earth’s largest extinctions to two unusually hot blobs of mantle 2800 kilometres beneath the crust. The blobs formed just after the Earth itself, 4.5 billion years ago. If the hypothesis is correct, they have sporadically burst through the planet’s crust, creating enormous oceans of lava which poisoned the atmosphere and wiped out entire branches of the tree of life: here.